Sphinx

Thucydides is The Most Fabulous Author In The World. I don’t mean this as a compliment, but rather as an evocation of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful film Time Bandits, in which a motley band of dwarves and an 11-year-old boy called Kevin – you know, it has only just occurred to me, thirty-seven years later, that this is a snarky Hobbit reference – embark on a quest to find The Most Fabulous Object In The World, concealed in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness (which of course demonstrates its desirability). The two key attributes of this Object are, firstly, that everyone sees it differently, as suits their own conception of Fabulousness, and, secondly, that the whole set-up is a trap.

And so with Thucydides: everyone sees him in their own terms, according to their own conception of an author with infinite wisdom and authority, and despite the fact that everyone else has a different conception (they’re just reading him wrong); the difficulty of making the text and its author conform to any modern conceptions, or of extracting any coherent theory or doctrine, just makes it all the more clearer that this must be worth the effort; and at the end – as I’ve argued before, this is the real Thucydides Trap – one is wholly in the thrall of the Evil One, intoning Thucydidean platitudes in response to more or less every current event.

Case in point: new article in the New York Review Of Books (or at least their blog; do we still draw this sort of distinction?) by Edward Mendelson, reflecting on the contemporary relevance of Thucydides to the United States. Mendelson opens with the apparent coincidence that he turned to Thucydides as an escape from the awful reality of the 2016 presidential election and found himself reading the prescient account of the Corcyrean stasis – yeah, right – before moving on to Pericles’ claims of Athenian exceptionalism, shown to be hollow by the plague and then Athens’ disastrous attack on Syracuse. In case readers haven’t got the message, he switches to Thucydides’ own claims for his work as a possession for all time.

He was proved right when Napoleon and Hitler sent their armies into Russia, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, when the United States sent its forces into Vietnam and Iraq.

This is all very familiar: Thucydides as the man who knows, who understands the way the world really works and who can help us understand, with his uncanny anticipation of future events. The question is always how this Thucydidean prescience is understood and explained, rather than simply taken for granted – and here Mendelson’s article takes an interestingly eccentric turn.

Historians argue among themselves whether Thucydides is a moralizing philosopher or, in a common phrase, “the first scientific historian.” What is radical about him, and gives him his unerring clear-sightedness, is that he is both.

Or, erm, neither? Yes, there’s a persistent tradition of claiming Thucydides as the inventor and exemplar of modern historiography, however conceived, though it’s not a position that any specialist today would defend in an unqualified manner. But it’s news to me that anyone, let alone any historian, has ever claimed that he’s a moralising philosopher. Far more common is the position articulated by Wilhelm Roscher, seeing Thucydides’ work as antipathetical to philosophy insofar as it’s concerned with the nature and fabric of reality rather than with abstract speculation. That’s the line followed by Nietzsche in contrasting Thucydides with Plato, arguing that the former has the courage to face reality as it is, rather than grounding his interpretation in morality or, like Plato, taking refuge in the ideal. Possibly Nietzsche is implying a philosophical position here – but, if so, it’s one akin to his own project, a critique of all moral values, rather than a moralising one.

The only precedent that comes to mind is Leo Strauss’ reading in The City and Man, and that always seemed to me more of an attempt to defuse the threat of historicism by emphasising Thucydides’ concern with broader transhistorical principles, rather than actually claiming that Thucydides wasn’t a historian at all. But Mendelson needs to imagine such a debate so that his solution – why can’t Thucydides be TWO sorts of anachronism? – makes any sense. (It’s not at all obvious what’s happened to Thucydides the Social Scientist, surely the most influential version in modern discourse…). But Thucydides is The Most Fabulous Author In The World; he is the sort of writer that the reader wants, delivering the desired perspective on the world.

He understands morals, not as a set of arbitrary rules imposed or wished upon reality, but part of the fabric of reality itself, in the same way that Greek philosophy had begun to understand physical laws as inseparable from reality… In Thucydides’s morally coherent universe, moral action is also, inevitably, practical action, and immoral action is inevitably impractical, no matter how insistently short-sighted strategists pretend that it isn’t.

Again: huh? This is so much the anti-Nietzschean Thucydides – not by suggesting that Thucydides doesn’t look to reality (he’s still not a Plato) but by claiming that Thucydides looks to reality and finds a coherent moral system embedded in it. As I remarked on the Twitter, this seems to echo F.M. Cornford’s argument that Thucydides tries to be a proper critical historian but can’t help seeing the world through a framework inherited from myth and tragedy – but like it’s a good thing. It’s not stated that Mendelson shares this view – one might, as Cornford does, offer this as a criticism of Thucydides’ account from a historical perspective – but it seems to be implied pretty strongly that he does, given that the whole point of the article is that Thucydides knows what’s really going on – why else reprint four paragraphs of the Corcyrean episode without feeling any need to offer concluding comments?

Implicit argument: Thucydides recognised the true (moral) nature of world, which is why his work speaks to us and predicted our present. The content of Thucydides’ philosophy is established in two ways: firstly, by events (Pericles was over-confident, and was killed by the plague; the Athenians acted with hubris, and were defeated), and, secondly, through the speeches. These are, Mendelson notes, normally presented in pairs (Pericles’ Funeral Oration isn’t, of course, but the Plague represents a kind of answering speech), and while Thucydides doesn’t offer any explicit endorsement of either side, “it is almost always clear which side is closest to his own habits of thought.”

This is a familiar line of argument from readers who seek to attribute normative political principles to Thucydides: in the crude Realist reading, the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue express Thucydides’ own views which are also basically true. Mendelson doesn’t discuss Melos, which is a shame as it would be interesting to know which side he thinks is obviously closer to Thucydides’ own habits of thought (one would guess the Melians, given the Athenians’ rejection of all moral arguments). Instead, the key example is the Mytilene debate: Diodotus is obviously right, as being anti-massacre – and the fact that his arguments are pragmatic rather than moral is not, as e.g. Cliff Orwin has argued, a sign of the debasement of Athenian political discourse ‘cos even the goodies are being cynically instrumentalist, but rather a claim that, as in the quote above, moral action is practical action and immoral action is inevitably impractical.

Hmm. I guess it would be nice to live in a world where, to quote another insightful text, “the good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeat them and save the day.” I just don’t believe a word of it, and think that such an attitude can lead only to dangerous complacency and quietism. More to the point, I struggle to imagine Thucydides believing a word of it. Too many people die pointlessly. His world is bleak; events are driven not by any objective moral order but by the decisions taken by people, under circumstances not of their own choosing, mostly on the basis of ignorance and uncontrolled emotion – and the fundamental question of the whole work is whether things could have been different and whether they can be different in future. He’s about questions, not answers.

Of course, that is just how I see The Most Fabulous Author In The World – just as convinced of his significance and relevance, but for a completely different world-view. But at least I can acknowledge the existence of other possible readings, and understand their attractions (while recuperating this into the idea that the power and Fabulousness of Thucydides lies precisely in his invitation to readers to project their desires onto him). It’s either that, or reviving my ‘Thucydides as killer zombie virus’ thesis for Halloween…

Addendum 1/11: Professor Mendelson has been in touch to assure me that his account of turning to Thucydides as a distraction from Trump’s election is absolutely true, and including a copy of the relevant course syllabus. My scepticism – which could certainly have been more politely expressed – was more directed at the idea that someone would pick up Thucydides without being fully primed for death and disaster – and one has to wonder at the Machiavellian thinking or unconscious anxieties that led to this choice of set text for election week… But quite possibly I am too conscious of Thucydides’ dark, brooding presence (which is, as I said, very much *my* Thucydides) to recognise that someone could perfectly well pick him up with the expectation of encountering the Greek past, not the all-too-disturbing present.